A review of OpenSUSE 10.3, which concludes: "While openSUSE's efforts to simplify Linux or Window-fy Linux can be commended, the inconsistency in their implementation is its downfall. Opening applications quickly becomes a chore with the excessive amount of clicks needed to find the application you want. The application browser loads slowly, looks cluttered, and uses icons that are too large. Yast has been improved but still feels slow."

The reviewer is absolutely correct that install takes way to long. But once installed I found it to be responsive. YaST seems improved, it loads fast, some of the plugins(?) seemed to take a while when invoked.

I didn't see where the reviewer mentioned what hardware was used in the review. SUSE has never been the best distro for older hardware,there are other distros targeting this market.

I didn't find any glaring problems with this release, everything worked as one would expect it to. Still, overall, this release is no threat to my current desktop (Linux Mint).

The reason it takes longer is because you left the option selected to "grab extra packages from the Internet". This will provide you with all the non-oss stuff you want (as the OSS CD is strictly open-source), but it will take longer since it will grab them from the Internet.

If you do an offline installation then it takes roughly 20-25 minutes. Not very long by anyone's count, is it?